4 or more.

Presumably you mean on this thread. How about an example from a recent year?

SciForums is rather lax about enforcing the rules against personal insults because it's an impossible standard to maintain in this crowd. I generally try to avoid insulting the people who post on my own subforum, but I have my weak moments, as most people do.

Noah Webster (1758-1843, the "Webster" in "Webster's Dictionary") tried to standardize English spelling. He attempted to make it more sensible, but his efforts in that direction were limited to things like respelling "centre" and "labour" as "center" and "labor." Considering that in both words the second syllable is pronounced the same way, why didn't he write "laber" or "centor"??? And all he really did was make American spelling different from British, which is hardly an accomplishment!

A major problem in any effort to make English spelling more phonetic is the fact that there are at least four recognized dialects of English (British, North American, Indian and Australia-New Zealand) and possibly a fifth (South African), and within those dialects there are quite a few different accents. Dialects differ in vocabulary and/or grammar ("you" vs. "youse" vs. "y'all" is both), while accents differ almost exclusively in pronunciation. Any way we re-spell a word, it's very likely that a couple of hundred million native speakers will call it illogical.

Now that people are used to spelling "before" as "B4" and "why" as "Y" in text messages, who knows where our spelling rules will go next? Probably out the window.

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I’ve always had a great interest in learning languages, and in the course of my life I’ve learnt or tried to learn German, French, Spanish, Italian, Finnish, Norwegian, Chinese (Mandarin), and various others. In recent times however I’ve become less ambitious, deciding to concentrate on what I call my Big Three: French, Spanish, Italian. (Together with my native language English, these make up my Big Four.

German, English, French, very fluent speaker, learned because I lived there for decades , do not write French, neither do Parrots, Myna birds.
True anecdote : 1958; French teacher to English radio audience: " when pronouncing the French "U" (umlaut) sound, think of kissing your girlfriend,--- no no no, not French kissing, no, - kissing her for the first time, with puckered lips!"
My favoured cross language understanding?:
" sterben" = dying in German
"starving" in english; it is medically correct that we all die of starvation. it is the same, and the ancients knew it.
my avatar means "life" in german when read backward, --"fog" like in "I don't have the foggiest--" on the title.

F R you are correct, in the narrow meaning of the word, --but the doctor who wrote the book "wie wir sterben' used it in a more general sense, like dying because the body is "starved" of Oxygen, although the apparent cause of that may be lung cancer, leukemia, hanging, or starved of input from the brain with a severed or crushed head, blood loss. Starvation, because the metabolism at every level finally ended.
Perhaps starvation in one way or another was observed to be the cause of death in the olden days, when these languages were closer. thank you!

The Angles, Saxons, Jutes and other Germanic tribes sailed to Britannia around 450CE, when the Roman Empire began to fall apart and the Roman administrators and Legionnaires left. We used to call their language "Old English," but since it was merely a pastiche of various intercomprehensible dialects of Old High German, we now call it Anglo-Saxon. So the first Anglisc (or "English" as the word is now spelled and pronounced) people did, indeed, speak German.

It wasn't until the Normans invaded in 1066 and seized control of "Angle Land" that the language began to diverge greatly from German, because of all the changes in vocabulary, grammar and phonetics caused by a huge influx of French words as Middle French became the language of government, business and scholarship. By the time the French overlords had assimilated into the population of what was now "England," Middle English became the official language.

So it's been barely one millennium since English started on its own evolutionary path and greatly diverged from German. That's probably not enough time to establish a new paradigm for death.

In any case, I'm sure those people understood that death can be caused by decapitation, a sword through the heart, being set on fire, and various other ghastly events that have nothing to do with food.

FR, I agree, the old folks probably did not dwell deeply into into the process of dying as a doctor would today, but I found it striking that the two words starving and sterben would agree so closely with what happens when life ebbs and goes out.This book was written by a doctor that tended to dying patients in the American Midwest. He went into great detail what happens to the different organs, cells as they are starved of nutrients, Oxygen, vital signals because of the failure or destruction of one of the organs furnishing them. Death does not occur with the squeeze of a trigger, the thrust of a dagger the fall of the blade of a guillotine, but in the minutes to hours after the flow of sustenance stops. Each cell becomes like a besieged, starving city. and linked to linguistics,
talking of the french conquest: The german word for sheep is Schaf, but the animal's meat in England is Mutton, from the french Mouton, les Brebis, so the indigenous tribes were allowed to raise the animals, but the new overlords took care of the eating. or?

. . . . I found it striking that the two words starving and sterben would agree so closely with what happens when life ebbs and goes out.

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It was quite common for words to shift meanings slowly, in the centuries before the printing press made literacy nearly universal, allowing people to communicate on a regular basis with people in distant lands who spoke the same language. Peek at the etymological section for any word definition in Dictionary.com . You'll find some downright fascinating instances of a word adopting quite different meanings in two language communties. For example, the German word knecht now means "farmhand," virtually the opposite of our modern English version of the word, "knight."

He went into great detail what happens to the different organs, cells as they are starved of nutrients, Oxygen . . . .

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If tissues are provided with oxygen, they will survive for quite a while without nutrients... as long as several hours, depending on species and type of tissue. But if the blood stops flowing, denying oxygen to the tissues, many kinds will die rather quickly--again, depending on the species. Most importantly, brain tissue in the cerebrum begins to lose its delicate structure within a few minutes. The more primitive parts of the brain will often keep the organism as a whole alive, but (assuming that it's a mammal or bird) the animal will never again exhibit the complete set of qualities that define life, such as the ability to eat.

Humans who have been in comas for many weeks are kept alive only by hooking them up to machines that keep their metabolism operating, for example by pumping nutrients into the blood.

The german word for sheep is Schaf, but the animal's meat in England is Mutton, from the french Mouton, les Brebis, so the indigenous tribes were allowed to raise the animals, but the new overlords took care of the eating. or?

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It's rather common with many meats that the animal itself carries the original Germanic name, which was used by the farmers. But the meat was named by the tax collectors and the money-changers, who spoke French.

The German word for sheep is Schaf, but the animal's meat in England is Mutton, from the french Mouton, les Brebis, so the indigenous tribes were allowed to raise the animals, but the new overlords took care of the eating. or?

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It's more a matter of the people who actually ran the farms, who spoke Anglo-Saxon, a dialect of Old German; whereas the people who ran the business of selling meat were Normans who spoke Medieval French. The same parallels can be found throughout the meat counter: deer/venison, chicken/cock, pig/pork, steer/beef.